The world of hotel web marketing and distribution, in one complex chart

The life of the hotel sector marketer or distribution strategist is not an easy one, and doesn’t show signs of getting any smoother any time soon.

In fact, just as the ecosystem appears to be settling down into an era of relative normality, something else comes along to shakes things up (with varying degrees of impact).

The aforementioned rate parity drama is one such issue, on a grand scale, another is the introduction of same-day, mobile booking applications.

Metasearch’s rise in recent years to become more than just a search tool (in-app bookings, etc) deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other disruptive influences on the hotel marketing discipline.

And all this is before calculating how the growth of sharing economy-type businesses will alter the way hoteliers market their businesses to a generation hell-bent on having a different type of “accommodation experience”.

US-based hotel marketing agency DPFOC has attempted to put the spaghetti-like permutations of it all into a single chart.